James Beard Public Market abandons downtown Morrison Bridge site

Rendering of the Beard Market's proposed Morrison Bridge site (Snøhetta)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Recently, wondering where things stood with the James Beard Public Market's ongoing efforts to raise money for a home at the west end of the Morrison Bridge, I reached out to the organization's leadership for an interview. Once we sat down to talk, I got more of a surprise than I was looking for.

It turns out that this summer the market's board of directors voted to abandon the multiyear dream of building at the Morrison Bridge/Naito Parkway site, and they have re-opened the discussion about where the James Beard Public Market will ultimately be built.

"We had for years dedicated our efforts to place the market at the west end of the Morrison Bridge. But the site just doesn't fit," explained Fred Granum, who last year succeeded the late Ron Paul, founder of the Beard Market campaign, as executive director. "Creating a public destination is our goal. We foresee hundreds of thousands a year coming. But the ramps on Naito Parkway [inside of which the market was to be built] would pose a true pedestrian hazard. Our wonderful friends at the City of Portland have pondered how the ramps might be modified. And there was continuous support from Mayor Hales and the Portland Bureau of Transportation to explore that with traffic studies. But it became obvious a few months ago that it wasn’t going to happen in our lifetime. The mission this organization has is to get a public market open. The challenges of that site were inhibiting our ability to do that. We as an organization reflected that there’s got to be another site. This is not the only site with the attributes we need."

The Morrison Bridge site was always a challenging one. It seemed like the JBPM leadership always wanted the bridge ramps to be gone, but their architect, Snøhetta, ultimately produced a design (or at least a rendering) based on the ramps staying and the market constructed inside and underneath them. The mayor and the relevant city bureaus seemed amenable to having the ramps removed, or at least engaging in studies of ramp removal, but at the end of the day the cost of removing the ramps might have easily fallen on the JBPM itself, which was not realistic given that the market is busy enough fundraising for itself.

"Clearly you’re talking years and years if not decades before it would happen," Granum added. "It was simply a huge task. Citizens like us can say those ramps should be modified, but there’s a lot of considerations we identified that were more than we were able to address in a timely fashion with our financial constraints in mind. We didn’t get into this to reconfigure traffic patterns."

Rendering of the Beard Market's proposed Morrison Bridge site (Snøhetta)

What's more, even if the ramps had been removed or a commitment was made to remove them, Naito Parkway is still an exceptionally unfriendly place for pedestrians. The street acts as a barrier between downtown and Tom McCall Waterfront Park, and retail is barely existent there. Things have improved in recent years with the opening of projects like the White Stag Block for the University of Oregon and the Mercy Corps headquarters just across Burnside, not to mention the Better Naito temporary reconfiguration of the street in the summertime. But ultimately the riddle of Naito probably would have needed to be solved before a major entity like the JBPM was willing to locate there, and that will take a long time.

Finding a new location for the Beard Market would seem to set back efforts to get it built, but ultimately Granum and his team believe it will allow them to build something sooner, not later. "We can do it sooner and cheaper at another site, and there are immediate opportunities that would accommodate our requirements," Granum said, "and will allow us to fulfill the vision that the constraints of the Morrison bridgehead would not have allowed."

So what happens next? "We’ve been invited to participate in the master planning at the OMSI site," the executive director explained, "and we're in conversations about the Innovation Quadrant it's part of. And there’s another site in the downtown area for which the developer has approached us. So we are soon to have a selection, I would anticipate. It could be two moths, four months. We’ve been very enthused by the interest others have about placing the market elsewhere."

The OMSI property makes a lot of sense because it's still on the waterfront right across the Hawthorne Bridge (downtown's most popular span for pedestrian crossings) from downtown, and well connected to transit including both MAX and the Portland Streetcar. And while the saddest part (from an architecture lover's perspective) about the abandonment of the Morrison Bridge site may be the end of the Beard Market's relationship with the internationally-renowned architecture firm Snøhetta, it turns out that Snøhetta has been hired by OMSI to master plan the museum's 17-acre property.

"We have the highest regard for Snøhetta," Granum said. "They’ve been a great, super, visionary partner in helping us capture the essence of what the market needs to be. They really get the culture here. But we anticipate wherever we build will be in collaboration with other people. We would not presume at this stage to dictate Snøhetta will be the architect. Would I like them to be? Sure. But I don’t want t to be out there that any body collaborating us somehow we get to dictate who the designer will be. We can’t walk in saying, 'Thou shall hire Snøhetta.'" But if the connection at OMSI were already established, perhaps Snøhetta could be re-hired as Beard Market designer. They certainly did a superlative job the first time around.

There is one drawback to the OMSI site, at least until the district transforms: to be successful, the market probably ought to be within walking distance of residential areas. It's arguable that not many people live near the Morrison site downtown, but that's quickly changing, not just with respect to apartments and condos but more and more hotels. The OMSI site is not very close to many hotels, unless you start looking at the ones across the river; but I'd go ahead and count that proximity as being in the site's favor. It's just that there aren't many people living near OMSI. The closest would be neighborhoods like my own, Ladd's Addition in Southeast. That said, residential development may become part of the OMSI site as it builds out. Certainly the majority of the Central Eastside's zoning will continue to not allow residential, but it will be possible at this southern cluster near Tilikum Crossing.

If not the OMSI site, another intriguing possibility for the James Beard Public Market would seem to be South Waterfront and, more specifically, the Zidell Yards. Recently the Zidell Marine Company announced it will next year shut down its barge-building terminal next door to OHSU's Center for Health & Healing and the Portland Aerial Tram. The Zidell facility's main structure, known in-house as "The Barn," is about two football fields long, all wide-volume open space. The market doesn't need all of it, but taking, say, half or one-third would provide an ideal home while giving the district a "there there," a reason for non-residents and people who don't work for or get treatment from OHSU to come to the area.

There is one other possibility for a Beard site that comes to mind, but unfortunately seems far less likely: Centennial Mills. If located here the market would be close to many thousands of Pearl District residents, be right on the river in a historic and food-oriented site (Portland was once the third-richest city in America because of all the Oregon wheat that shipped out of these mills), and still be just a few blocks north of downtown. Yet the city has been seemingly focused more on tearing down than building up, and it has seen a series of relationships with potential developers fizzle. Naito Parkway would also still be a problem here; Centennial Mills arguably needs a pedestrian bridge over Naito and the railroad.

Ultimately, of course, only time will tell where the James Beard Public Market lands. But make no mistake: although Portland already has farmers markets and food halls, we still need this project to happen. While it's disappointing to see a great project like Snøhetta's disappear or become relegated to the annals of the permanently unbuilt, we may wind up seeing the market come to fruition sooner along one side of Tilikum Crossing than we would have at the Morrison Bridge site, and given that latter site's constraint, the architectural space being created could still be better (particularly if Snøhetta or its caliber of firm were involved) than what any architect could shoehorn between a pair of circular bridge ramps.

I also hope that as city leaders such as our incoming mayor consider the fate of the James Beard Public Market, they engage not in the kind of siloed thinking that has plagued Portland development in recent years but instead think of the JBPM as one important piece of a larger civic puzzle in the central city. We should be thinking about how the OMSI parcel and the Innovation Quadrant along either side of Tilikum relate to other opportunities for the central city such as on both sides of the Morrison Bridge with the Rose Quarter, the Blanchard Portland Public Schools site, Centennial Mills, and the downtown Postal Service site.

The James Beard Public Market as we knew it is dead. Long live the James Beard Public Market! It's a reminder of that old cliche that the Chinese characters for "crisis" and "opportunity" are actually the same.

It was clear from the start this was a terrible location for the market given the auto dominated context. OMSI and SOWA are equally problematic. For the market to succeed a critical mass of pedestrian activity is required. The obvious choice is one that was previously studied and rejected: the central fire station near Ankeny Fountain. With its existing front and rear garage doors one can imagine an open air porous space spilling out on both sides. This is one of most architecturally interesting parts of the city and the combination of the JBPM and the Saturday Market would be mutually reinforcing . The JBPM would also help to spur the development of the many nearby surface parking lots. Its proximity to the Retail Core, Old town/Chinatown, Lower Burnside and the Waterfront would be equally helpful to those areas in need of investment. Locating the market in a new sterile environment on the edge of the core without an established critical mass of pedestrians will not lead to its success. The fire station is taking up precious space in a historically rich area. Build a new fire station in the Morrison Bridge ramps with two twin towers of light on each side of the bridge thereby gaining a stunning visual addition to our skyline and gateway to downtown while utilizing space only fit for vehicles. This seems so obvious but it requires political and financial leadership. Unfortunately this city is very much in need of both at present.

Fire Station #1 was recently seismically improved after it was determined that the cost of building a new fire station - for purposes of a combined Public Market and Saturday was considered to be too costly. This part of town has already received tens of millions of public investment that has resulted in $100 million in projects, a thousand jobs and tens of thousands of new visits to the area by customers, attendees of events at Mercy Corps and U of O in addition to students there and at the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine.

In addition, the balance of this area is largely controlled by the Goodman family who is already committed to development between Burnside and Morrison Bridge. The owners of the Morrison Bridge site are equally motivated to develop,

If a public market is a priority, it's role as an attractor could be played many other places in town in addition to the ones mentioned.

Would it be cost-prohibitive to build it atop I-405 between SW Alder and NW Couch if those air rights were sold for $1? That would save several million dollars in land costs. Instead of being compromised by busy arterials the James Beard Public Market and associated development could help knit together four different west-side neighborhoods. Perhaps a similar argument could be made for building it across I-84 between MLK and Grand. It would be next door to the Convention center and in between the new housing in the Lloyd District and the Burnside Bridgehead and close to the proposed Convention Center Hotel and new hotel proposed on MLK. It would be directly accessed by the streetcar on both sides and not too far from the MAX lines and served by several bus routes. It might interfere with - or take advantage of - ODOT's plans to widen both I-5 and I-84 at their intersection,

South of Waterfront Park is a city-owned strip of land that seems to be ideal for the public market, and in my opinion, a much better option than locating it on the east side of the river. With this location, stronger connections could be made between downtown and the river, and it would be much more accessible to those working and living downtown.

I did a quick write up with more detail:
http://www.drempd.com/blog/A-Better-Location-for-Portlands-Public-Market

Having opened and closed a business in South Waterfront, I have learned that there are problems with this neighborhood and its image in the minds of Portlanders. "There is no there, there." It is a high rise bedroom community that has very few services or attractions. There is no grocery store, no pharmacy (not even at OHSU), few restaurants, no entertainment venues. There is no permanent attraction to draw people into the district. Very few people outside the immediate area know where and what SoWa is. Residents of the area leave for dining in and entertainment options in other parts of the city. Many people feel its modern high rise canyons are '"not Portland." There is a perception that the neighborhood is a dead end and the only way out is to turn around and leave the way one came in. It doesn't attract people who live in the upscale 'hoods to the south: Dunthorpe, Lake Oswego, West Linn. Even though it is an area well-served by Max, streetcars, buses, and is bicycle and pedestrian friendly, it's only the tourists who venture there. Parking is an issue and traffic will continue to be disrupted for years as OHSU expands its campus. For a project like JBPM to be successful, it needs to be at a crossroads that can be reached by many more than the residents of the immediate surrounding neighborhoods. The Pike Place Market in Seattle is a great tourist destination, but in reality only serves a small portion of Seattle's population. Plus, with Portland being so well-served by New Season's Markets, Whole Foods, Zupan's and more, it would take a very powerful draw to get a significant part of our population to use it.

Mr. Englander’s suggestion of the market as an attractor I think is the key point on whether a given location is suitable. If one thinks the market in and of itself will draw enough traffic to be successful then OMSI and SOWA are potential sites. However, if one believes as I do--that a critical mass of foot and auto traffic and mutually reinforcing adjacent uses is required--there are only a few sites in the core that would be successful. Seattle maybe helpful in this regard. Pike Place Market and the WA Convention Center bookend the retail core. This is a successful mutual reinforcement of adjacent uses. I realize JBPM is not intended to be a tourist trap as most of Pike Place is today but an authentic functioning market with both retail and educational missions still I believe the locational lesson is applicable. Like it or not JBPM will be a primary retail use and getting the location right is the most important decision to be made. Another idea: If BOORA's ODOT blocks concept in the Central Eastside were to happen, this could be a potential home for the JBPM.